Style

Sensuous Steel

A roomful of gorgeous vehicles arrayed in Nashville’s Frist Center for the Visual Arts in advance of the opening of the new exhibit “Sensuous Steel: Art Deco Automobiles.”, By Hans Schmidt-Matzen/Courtesy of the Frist Center.

Ken Gross bought his first car magazine when he was 12 years old and brought it home proudly to show his father. His dad was not interested. So Gross spent his adolescence trying to convince his old man that, despite the fact that he worked for cheap in a gas station and spent all of his spare time wrenching on hot rods, he could do something productive in his life with automobiles. “I wasn’t very persuasive,” Gross told us. “I went to undergraduate school and majored in English, and then went to business school and got a business degree.”

After 20 years working in marketing and advertising, Gross started freelancing for a number of car magazines, and within a decade, he’d found enough work that he was able to quit his day job and become a full-time car writer. (Among other recurring gigs, he’s been the auto reviewer for Playboy for more than 35 years.) Further disproving his father’s assumptions, Ken has also found work as a ghostwriter, a credited author, and a judge of classic Concours d’Elegance.

But in recent years, he’s found an additional sideline: he’s helped a handful of museums around the country mount shows in which automobiles have been displayed as fine art. The exhibits—in diverse locations including Atlanta, Portland, and Salt Lake City—have been a surprise hit for said venues, bringing in record crowds and expanding the range of visitors that came through these museums’ doors.

Gross’s latest curatorial venture, “Sensuous Steel,” opened this weekend at the Frist Center in Nashville, alongside more traditional surveys like “Exploring Art of the Ancient Americas.” From our perspective, the show looks spectacular, featuring, as it does, 18 breathtaking cars (and two motorcycles) from the Art Deco era. The streamlined curves, aviation-inspired adornments, and experimental implementation of the “exotic” that are hallmarks of this design movement are all on dramatic display.

We have yet to make it down to visit the show (though we plan to before it closes on September 15), but these exquisite photos by Peter Harholdt, lend credibility to Gross’s keen belief that the automobile may be the next of our overlooked artifacts—like decorative arts, graphic design, or the work of untrained artists—to be anointed as proper objet.

“I think the biggest surprise of doing these shows,” Gross told us, “has been that traditional art-museum patrons—people who love the Old Masters, or even people who like modern art—have shown terrific enthusiasm. I thought I’d have to do a much harder sell with art patrons, and that has not been the case.”

We’ve long admired these automotive forms as sculpture, so we didn’t need our curatorial arms twisted at all. But click through the slide show of some of our favorite of the exhibit’s vehicles, and judge these fascinating works for yourself.